In fact, they're damned cute, even if it is a cuteness tempered by a constant awareness that neither their necks nor their knees would survive in a standard-gravity environment. While they are entirely freakish in terms of proportions, I'd be lying if I said they weren't cute. The toddlers, thankfully, exhibit a little more imagination in their appearance. Yamamoto fares no better, with her long brown hair and sizable bosom making her the very paragon of visual vanilla. Tsuchida, for example, seems to have gathered the most ordinary, unremarkable visual traits of every weak male lead in the history of anime, and rolled them into one 5 foot 9, glasses-wearing, black-haired lump of dullness. For the most part, the protagonists' appearances are entirely forgettable and almost insultingly generic. The character designs, however, leave much to be desired. The general art style suits the kindergarten setting very well, with bright colours and simple backgrounds being the order of the day. It's never eye-catching in any way, though it does not need to be. Visually, Hanamaru is clean, smooth, and anything else that is to be expected of a 2010 anime.
As such, Hanamaru will likely have plenty of appeal for the mindless moe crowd but, even then, there are many shows - such as Gakuen Alice or Card Captor Sakura - which are capable of providing you with your RDA of cuteness and more besides. Such elements - through a necessity to compensate for the threadbareness of plot and humour more than anything else - make up the backbone of the anime. With all that said, the show IS thoroughly cute and even the most cold-hearted and embittered balls of hate amongst my readership would have difficulty in stifling a desire to hug any and all nearby objects upon the site of Hiiragi dressed as Panda-cat or Koume shedding a few tears. In short, Hanamaru's story comes across as so simplistic and derivative, it could easily have been written in green crayon by one of its protagonists.
HANAMARU KINDERGARTEN SERIES
All that remains after this is a series of clichéd misadventures, which rarely threaten to amuse, much less engage. The unorthodox love triangle between Anzu, Tsuchida and Yamamoto - which ostensibly comprises the core of the plot - never develops in any meaningful way, and the manner in which it concludes is disappointing and predictable in equal measures. It is hard to judge the story of Hanamaru Youchien, because there is nothing worthy of being called such. As you may have already inferred from the way I am writing, the rest does not take care of itself and the progeny of overly simple characters and an utter disregard for narrative is stillborn, noteworthy only for the adorable twinkle to its dead eyes. However, it is one which labours under the fantasy that there is nothing more to moe than having a handful of cute characters and expecting the rest to take care of itself. From the character designs alone, it's clear that Hanamaru has no higher ambition than to be a cute and comedic moefest. Sound familiar? Chances are it will if you've seen Kodomo no Jikan but, where the latter was bold and provocative, Hanamaru is lighthearted and short on substance. Hanamaru Youchien's story revolves around a precocious young girl who makes inappropriate advances on her teacher. The other being the fact that anime-planet's own KiraRin continues to take much vindictive pleasure in abusing my generous participation in the forum's TACO club and forcing me to watch shows which she deems to be sufficiently loli-oriented. This was one of the reasons I ended up watching Hanamaru Youchien. Needles to say, my mental and physical exhaustion left me demanding nothing less than the most mindless entertainment available. For those of you uninitiated with this particular pleasure, it is akin to removing the world's largest and most awkward price sticker from an abjectly disappointing present - in this case, masonry. My Easter weekend this year was in its entirety spent stripping waterproof wallpaper from the spare room.
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